HOCKEY'S BIG BROTHER ACT

Published: March 29, 1987

(Page 2 of 4)

''The Sutters take advantage of there being only one referee,'' says Max McNab, vice president and general manager of the New Jersey Devils. ''They have a superb sense of what they can get away with. They'll antagonize you; they manufacture little things that distract you.''

The Islanders' Duane Sutter is rated as one of the league's best at ''yapping'' - keeping up an incessant repartee that drives opposing players to distraction, or to the penalty box. His nickname is Dog.

There can be a fine line between banging and fighting - one frequently leads to the other. But the Sutters, despite their physical play, are not known as goons or thugs. Rather than picking fights, they prefer to aggravate opponents, then skate away, their mission accomplished.

The brothers don't apologize for their aggressive methods. ''I always had to scratch and fight for whatever I got,'' Brian Sutter says, and he is surely speaking for the others. ''Too many guys are bigger; too many are faster. I'm not the type of guy who can go out and finesse his way around with the puck. So when you go against me you're going to get banged around a little bit. That's the only way I can play.''

OTHER FAMILIES HAVE produced hockey-playing sons in multiples. Bill, Bob, Frank and George Boucher played in the National Hockey League in the 1920's, though not all at the same time. Five Bentley brothers came out of Saskatchewan in the 1940's and early 50's; three of them made it to the N.H.L. and two, Doug and Max, eventually to the Hall of Fame; two others played in the minor leagues. Five Dineen brothers currently play: Gord, Kevin and Peter Dineen in the N.H.L., one older brother in a minor league and another at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. But in many hockey families - those of Wayne Gretzky and Bryan Trottier, for example - the younger brothers have not yet proved able to handle the pressure that comes with constant comparison to a talented big brother.

That can be a weight on children as well as siblings. Gordie Howe, the league's all-time scoring leader and a ferocious competitor, extended his career so that he could be the only man in the N.H.L. to play with his two sons. It took until he was 51, in his 26th season, with the Hartford Whalers in the 1979-80 season. One son, Mark, has emerged as one of the league's top defensemen, but the other, Marty, played only a few disappointing years.

Among the Sutters, however, the success of the older brothers has sustained the younger ones, perhaps because they never posted impossible-to-match records. ''None of us has that much ability,'' Darryl says. ''We just relied on effort. That helped all of us, because all we had to do was try as hard as we could. That wasn't pressure.''

The Sutters grew up on a farm outside Viking, Alberta, 90 miles east of Edmonton. The landscape is flat, the vast wheat fields fertile. Tall green grain elevators guard the town's southern exposure. In their shadow stands a modest billboard: Viking. The Crossroads Town With a Future. Home of the Sutters. Population: 1,227.

Louis and Grace Sutter met and were married in Viking. Grace's family, carpenters and farmers by trade, had moved from Saskatchewan when she was a child. Louis, one of 13 children, grew up on a farm north of Viking, where his family had moved in 1910. His grandfather's family moved from Ontario to homestead in Alberta.

Grace, now 51, and Louis, 55, settled on the Sutter homestead and had seven boys. Gary, the first-born, decided when he was 16 that he'd rather stay home than play professional hockey; he now farms about 15 miles away and works part-time for the Alberta Department of Highways. In 1967, when the twins were 3 and Gary was 12, the family moved closer to Viking, where the soil was richer and the schoolbus rides shorter. The modest white farmhouse had four bedrooms.

''You'd open the door and be in this small foyer,'' recalls John Chapman, now the general manager of the Calgary Wranglers, who coached the brothers in the minor leagues. ''You'd have rubber boots, coveralls, overalls, cowboy hats, the hockey skates, the sticks. Sometimes you couldn't see how you could get through. The house had a big kitchen and a very small living room. It was a crowded house. With the guys being as close as they were, age-wise and otherwise, it must have been especially competitive.'' He pauses and grins. ''Louie is very competitive, a very competitive guy, and Grace has a great deal of determination, a quiet competitiveness.''

Louie Sutter never played hockey; his sons have never even seen him on skates. Softball was his game, and he was known in the local leagues as a strong-armed shortstop with a fiery temper. He hated to lose. The boys would watch him play on weekends, then challenge him at home: Darryl remembers that ''he would come out and play road hockey and beat the hell out of us.''

Road hockey - no skates, and a ball for a puck - was played year-round, summers in the barn, winters in the yard. But the Sutter boys also skated through the fierce winters of Alberta, where cold snaps reach 40 below. ''We had an old truck, and Gary would drive them about a mile across the fields to a pond,'' Louie Sutter recalls, gazing out a window at the farmyard. ''They'd always stay too long, and the smaller ones would be crying to go home, and the older ones would be yelling that they didn't want to, and of course they'd all come home yelling at one another.'' Fistfights and bloody noses were common.